Mother Father Deaf: Living Between Sound and Silence

by PaulPreston (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  1994

  $3.28

  Mother father deaf is the phrase commonly used within the deaf community to refer to hearing children of deaf parents. These children grow up between two cultures, the hearing and the deaf, forever balancing the worlds of sound and silence, while their sense of self and family forms. The author was one of these children, and this study features the place where deaf and hearing cultures meet; a place where families like his own embody the conflicts and resolutions of two world views. Based on 150 interviews with adult hearing children of deaf parents throughout the United States, this book includes both anecdote and analysis, with insights into a family life normally closed to outsiders. As they describe their family histories, their childhood memories, their sense of themselves as adults, and their life choices, these men and women occupy the middle ground between spoken and sign language, sameness and otherness, the stigmatizing and the stigmatized. Their stories challenge many of mainstream society's myths about hearing and deafness, highlighting the drama of belonging and being different as it unfolds within the self. In light of these narratives, Preston examines the process of assimilation and cultural affiliation among a population whose lives incorporate the paradox of being culturally deaf , yet functionally hearing.